âWhatâs on my mind is that scar on the left side of your face, right below the sharp edge of your jaw, how it looks like an arrow. How I wish I were brave enough to trace my finger like a road on a map until I hit somewhere to call home. When you drank your first beer, did you pretend to feel the buzz just to make the cool kids stop calling you a fucking loser? Or maybe you were the cool kid. Maybe you pressed cheap alcohol into the palms of kids like me. Careful kids. Color in the lines kids. Also, key lime pie. Specifically, my momâs. Would you eat it? I know you hate pie, but how many girlsâ momsâ pies have you eaten just to please some girlâs mom? A lot, Iâm sure. Too many. But I like you. Even though you are a raging republican. Even though you practice dinner party talk in my bed. (Especially because I think thatâs you trying to impress me.) And sometimes, when we dare to let the silence sit, I wonder if the first people to get married regretted it. Did they lie side-by-side five years past their vows and rearrange letters of the alphabet just to find the right word: Done. Damaged. Different. Devoid. Divide. Divorce. Yes, they thought, as they unlinked their hands. Divorce. Because it burns something ugly on the tongue. I wonder if weâll ever get divorced before I remember that we arenât married. We arenât anything. Then, of course, I wonder, what the hell weâre doing. And on that note: Hell. Do you believe in it? Because I do. I think I do. At least I might. Or do you make up stories about the girl over there nose deep in the Bible or the man with no hair who keeps nodding off. The people on subways and street corners, half-awake. When you guess at their lives, are they happily ever afters with green grass lawns and dogs who donât bark? Do they believe in hell? And even if they do and you do and suddenly you see some small fragment of yourself in the glass of her eyes, does that mean you wonât bury her jagged pieces so deep she loses her sharpness? And when she exhumes that grave and slips idiosyncrasies back under her skin like splinters, will you stay for something beyond the guilt? When she finally cracks open her mind just to let you peek at the bone and raw edges, will you even remember asking for all of this in the first place? No. Of course you wonât. So I smile. I stretch. You hold me like a question mark, quiet and careful and waiting. There are things youâd like me to say, but the silence is so much sweeter. Stranger hands wander down my waist, and you ask, once more, âWhatâs on your mind?â âNothing,â I say. âI was just falling asleep.ââ
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